One mother’s struggle to help her drug-addicted son

Neal Simpson

Monday

Jun 25, 2012 at 12:01 AMJun 25, 2012 at 2:01 AM

A few months before Jeffrey Sobczak’s death in October 2008, and after decades of trying, Ann McCullough ran into him in a parking lot and urged her 42-year-old son, yet again, to come home and get help. “I begged him and I begged him, I said, ‘Jeffrey, do something,’ and it was too late,” McCullough said.

One in an occasional series on drug deaths on the South Shore.

Three years have gone by and Ann McCullough still struggles to understand how she could spend a lifetime helping strangers overcome addiction while failing to save her own son.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. A few months before Jeffrey Sobczak’s death in October 2008, and after decades of trying, McCullough ran into him in a parking lot and urged her 42-year-old son, yet again, to come home and get help.

“I begged him and I begged him, I said, ‘Jeffrey, do something,’ and it was too late,” McCullough said.

“He couldn’t see his way out of the deep hole. He kept saying over and over again, ‘Mom, you don’t know how bad it is,’” McCullough said. “What he didn’t know was that I did know how bad it was. I had climbed out of that hole myself.”

Sobczak’s long struggle with addiction ended on the morning of Oct. 9, 2008, his body found draped in an afghan in a relative’s house overlooking the beach. He was the fourth person to die from a drug overdose that year in Hull, a town with a little more than 10,000 residents.

A review of thousands of death certificates by The Patriot Ledger found that at least 93 people died from drug abuse and overdoses in 10 smaller towns south of Boston between 2007 and the end of 2011. At least 15 Hull residents died over the five-year period, giving the town an overdose death rate higher than many of its neighbors.

But the numbers only hint at how drug abuse can devastate a community and family.

As the life of Jeffrey Sobczak shows, no drug death occurs in isolation, and the suffering continues long after an addict has succumbed.

“It’s like watching someone drowning and there’s nothing you can do for them,” said Sobczak’s sister, Andrea Tramontana. “No matter how hard you try to get to them.”

Born in 1966, the young Sobczak was a bright, charming boy with a head of blond hair and a knack for dismantling various gadgets and putting the pieces back together. But as he grew older, Sobczak eventually started drinking – probably during middle school, his sister believes – and later moved on to marijuana and cocaine.

He started getting in trouble with the police, and the escalating fights with his mother got so bad she eventually kicked him out of the house when he was 19.

Over the years, Sobczak would drift in and out of family life, often disappearing for weeks or months, leaving his mother and sister to wonder where he was and whether he was still alive.

When he was present, Sobczak’s charm and humor could brighten a room, his family said. He formed a particularly strong bond with Tramontana’s young son, Jack.

But most of the time Sobczak’s drug abuse kept him at odds with his family.

McCullough, who had overcome alcohol addiction herself and spent her career developing corporate addiction treatment programs, tried repeatedly over the years to get help for her son.

“He never really felt like he really had a problem,” his sister said.

There were breaking points.

Once, about two years before Sobczak’s death, Tramontana ran into a friend of her brother’s and was led to a squalid apartment, where she found Sobczak sprawled across a mattress under the influence of some unknown drug.

Tramontana brought her brother home to care for him, but when he bolted from the house half-naked “like a madman,” she called the police and had her brother involuntarily committed to a treatment program under Section 35 of the state’s mental health laws.

Sobczak was furious with his sister, but the program worked and he returned home clean.

Tramontana said the following year and half were the best time they’d shared since they were children. Sobczak was part of the family again, she said, and her husband and kids loved him.

But Sobczak’s demons would not be defeated. Tramontana eventually noticed that her brother was smoking marijuana again, and then he started drinking. When Sobczak’s demeanor changed suddenly, his family suspected he had finally gotten into opiates.

His decline was swift. After a few months, a paramedic who was called in by a dealer told Sobczak he’d be dead in a week if he didn’t seek treatment. He died the next morning.

“That morning, he went into my cousin’s house on the beach, he lay down on the couch, put an afghan over him and the body just gave out,” his mother said. “On the coroner’s report, it said ‘chronic abuse of opiates,’ and I don’t know, something else, but it was drugs, pure and simple.”

Some in the family still have not forgiven Sobczak for everything he put them through, but his mother and sister harbor no anger – only sadness and regret.

“If you look at it like someone with cancer, they don’t choose to get it, they just get it and it doesn’t make you stop loving them,” said Tramontana. “It’s just another disease, and there’s no cure unless someone really wants to do it.”

And for Sobczak’s mother, who has spent three decades helping others break free from the stranglehold of addiction, it’s hard to shake a lingering sense of failure.

“You can help so many, but you can’t help your own and that has been the hardest thing for me to accept since he died,” she said. “I know he’s in a better place – my faith gives me that – but I think of all the opportunities and maybe I could have done a little more.

“But there was really nothing I could do,” she said, sounding as if she were reassuring herself.

“I did everything I could.”

Neal Simpson may be reached at nesimpson@ledger.com.

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